Hard News: Rationalisation is at hand!
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...the Straitjacket Fits guys after they received the Legacy Award...
Which they so richly deserve. It was great to see John Collie (not to be confused with John Kelcher ;) ) wearing a "Brockville Brotherhood" t-shirt (said location being the working-class Dunedin suburb he and Carter grew up in).
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yeah - if you want to stop stupid people from voting you have to educate them and make them not-stupid
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Thank goodness for alternative views.
I've even tried to make sense of the finance thing myself
new paradigm neededThe best analysis has come from Robin Blackburn over at NewLeft
Despite all that I must say for once I agree with the experts at NZX and NZI on some practical steps that would show real leadership and help out.
Has nayone noticed that the NZX has a new blog NZX blog might be a good place to make some of these comments
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Hmmmm... Maybe everyone who is going to vote National is already voting National and has been for the last couple of years, whilst Labour is now hoovering back up the previously uncounted undecideds?
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Which they so richly deserve. It was great to see John Collie (not to be confused with John Kelcher ;) ) wearing a "Brockville Brotherhood" t-shirt (said location being the working-class Dunedin suburb he and Carter grew up in).
As immortalised in R.E.M.'s little-known Dunedin music tribute 'Don't Go Back to Brockville'.
Oh. Hang on ...
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@Tom lets hope so
Are there any punters expecting Green to get past 6% - maybe even higher if it gets too hard to vote L but want some alternative to the lack of insight or leadership from Nats?
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I spent many of my teenage geek Saturday nights in Brockville in the 70s ripping off signals from weather satellites - it was just us and the hoons (a venerable kiwi word sadly fallen on tough times)
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the hoons (a venerable kiwi word sadly fallen on tough times)
I once submitted a movie review of "Goodbye Pork Pie" to IMDb using the term hoon to describe Gerry (Blondini 1).
The yankee editors changed it to goon, and there didn't seem to be any way to get it changed back (Admittedly, this was in the early days of IMDb ) -
But seriously: stupid people have interests to, and they are just as deserving of representation.
People under 18 years of age have interests too, and are deseving of representation.
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Steve: I agree entirely
And it would be interesting to know how today's children feel about John Key saddling them with debt so he can give a great stonking tax cut to his rich mates.
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I/S:
...so he can give a great stonking tax cut to his rich mates.
Is that sort of rhetoric really helpful? I earn somewhere close to the top tax bracket and yet...
I didn't ask for a tax cut. I don't need a tax cut. I'd be happy to pay more tax to give lower income people a tax cut. I also have absolutely no intention of voting National or Act. How is it at all meaninful to class everyone that earns one dollar above the average wage as "John Key's rich mates"? Classifying people's political orientation solely on their income is both incorrect and mildly insulting.
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More from the Herald...
It appears that ACT have a new weapon in the electoral battle for hearts and minds.
All hope is lost.
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On the evidence of the video you could give 5 year olds the vote and still be confident you hadn't reduced the reasoning power of the electorate as a whole.
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Jason: I think the U.S. style culture war waged against labour by the likes of Family First, Sensible Sentencing etc etc over the last three years has managed to put doubt into the minds of a lot of traditional Labour supporters, moving some of them into disengaged no voters, undecided voters and even -heaven forbid it to be true - possibly reluctant National voters.
But while the third party culture war offensive of the right has shaken these Labour supporters, it hasn't detached them completely, and hopefully (for us Labourites) they are now starting to come home to mumma in the campaign.
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Eddie - I'm in the same boat and mostly agree with you (I don't mind paying tax, I think it's a civic responsibility) - but I think it's a fair comment - the well off make out with this big time because of the 39->33% tax cut
Maybe we could personalise it - the PM makes $375K a year - Key wants the job and he wants a 6% tax cut on income over ~75k - that means that under a National govt the PM will be getting 6% more on $300k of their income - $18,000 a year - or $346 a week - or 20 blocks of cheese in today's currency
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Maybe she'd had a heads-up on the new Roy Morgan poll.
Um, wow.
I thought Roy Morgan was a nasty foreign organisation with dodgy methodology and a long run of rogue polls? Still, does show that not releasing any policy and sticking to headline-grabbing 'reallocations' is doing the trick. Perhaps.
And it would be interesting to know how today's children feel about John Key saddling them with debt so he can give a great stonking tax cut to his rich mates.
*sigh* Thanks for adding to the store of high quality campaign debate, I/S. Exactly what I expect from a tool of the Stalinist dykeocracy, which is in thrall to it's PC union and academic fellow travellers.
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Nat 52, Lab 48, Greens 11, Maori 4-7, ACT 4, Progs and UF 1
Now if Hide loses Epsom that would put a further complexion on things:
Lab 48 / Green 11 / Prog 1 = 60 votes. -
__...so he can give a great stonking tax cut to his rich mates.__
Is that sort of rhetoric really helpful? I earn somewhere close to the top tax bracket and yet...
We all love and respect I/S and we strive to forgive him his "eat the rich" moments.
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But: run it through the MMP calculator and see the results: Nat 52, Lab 48, Greens 11, Maori 4-7, ACT 4, Progs and UF 1 each. Its a three-way coalition either way, with the Maori Party as kingmakers (and ACT as the other partner in their menage a trois).
Really depends on the size of the overhang.
If Maori get all 7 seats, but only enough list vote for 1 of them, it's 126 MPs in the house, and you need 64 to form a government (the progressive will possibly also cause an overhang?).
That's National, Maori, Act, _and_ UF.
Or Labour, Greens, Maori (and progressive most likely).
It gets even more complicated if NZ First get in through Tauranga. That'd be 3 or 4 seats, at least one of which would come off Labour, and one off National. Be like herding cats, dogs, and whales together to try and form a government.
But seriously
Yeah, to point out the obvious, my comment wasn't serious.
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I was on the Sunshine Coast last week and there was actually a road sign (an official one) in Mooloolaba which said "no hooning". so obviously a well understood and in-current-use word in Oz.
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ask the business lobbyists why the only form of welfare they never have any problem with is corporate
Yes, I'm tired of the constant bleating from business reps about red tape in the face of consistent evidence that we have less of it than nearly every other country they could move to. I'd rather they just got on with playing their very crucial role in creating more value, but maybe transferring costs onto others is the only way many of em know how to make a profit.
I'm with Lucy that R&D is an obvious exception where I'd like to see far more co-investment so we benefit from shifting rapidly to a high-value economy.
It seemed to take media outlets (including the part of Morning Report I heard) ages to cotton on to the implications of the Nats repealing the "Mallard amendment" - that employers would simply transfer their own 2% contribution onto their KiwiSaver-enrolled employees during wage negotiations over the next few years. Cynical.
The Standard got there pretty quickly, and even the Herald caught up today. No doubt there are others too, but like many PAS rollers, I had work to fit in..
I'd like to hope that voters are smarter than we get credit for (except them Palin ones). I was pleasantly surprised to see a Stuff poll yesterday with most respondents (3000+) rejecting the bribe (yes, I know teh online polls are unreliable - but the bias usually seems to go the other way, much like the rabid comments).
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Maybe we could personalise it - the PM makes $375K a year - Key wants the job and he wants a 6% tax cut on income over ~75k - that means that under a National govt the PM will be getting 6% more on $300k of their income - $18,000 a year - or $346 a week - or 20 blocks of cheese in today's currency
Fair enough, Paul, I take your point (although the 33% thing seems to me to be aspirational from National - they haven't come out with any actual policy ideas of how to get there). But I wasn't really disputing that the well off did better under their tax cuts - they do. I was just objecting to I/S's implication that anybody who earns over $45,000 will immediately give in to greed and be bribed by tax cuts into voting National. As Russell said - I/S's analysis is generally superb, but the "eat the rich" moments do grate.
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We all love and respect I/S and we strive to forgive him his "eat the rich" moments.
There is a serious point here: politics, particularly around tax and employment relations policy, is fundamentally about distribution, about who gets what. And when a party proposes policies with the primary aim of enriching its supporters at the expense of the majority of New Zealanders or of future generations, that's not something we should politiely look the other way on.
"Class" is a dirty word in new Zealand, and rightly so. But that shouldn't blind us to the fact that we have a wannabe upper class in this country who want to use the state to enrich themselves and entrench their position - in the process undermining the kiwi dream of an egalitarian, classless society, where people who didn't go to high school can become Prime Minister, and people who grew up in a state house can become high-flying executives in global corporations.
Dismiss this as "eat the rich" if you want - but its being willfully blind to a serious threat to our way of life, and one of our most powerful long-term political dynamics. Chris Trotter is an ass, but one of the things he is right about is that this struggle between an egalitarian dream and an aristocratic one has been the driving force in our politics for over a century. And it is as strong as ever in this campaign.
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Has anybody asked Key how big his tax cut will be?
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I/S, listen, please, instead of lecturing.
I, and many others over the average wage, benefit from National's proposed tax cuts.
I, and many others over the average wage, do not vote for National.
Dismissing all in the above group as evil right wingers who are out only for themselves and will vote solely on short-term economic self interest is, to use your words, "willfully blind" to how people actually make political decisions.
To reiterate the core point I made in my first post. Assuming all those over the average wage are National voters is both incorrect and slightly insulting. If the Nats want my vote they can start by being a bit nicer to teh gayz, ethnic minorities, beneficiaries, and the working poor - not by offering tax cuts.
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